


Denmark

by Avaunt



Category: Sherlock (TV), Supernatural
Genre: Afterlife, Americanisms, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 11:05:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avaunt/pseuds/Avaunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are more things in Heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of by any philosophy, but Hell has never conceived of anything like Sherlock Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Denmark

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of by any philosophy, but Hell has never conceived of anything like Sherlock Holmes. 

This is how it happens: he sends John away because John can read him too well, which means Moriarty can read John, and that’s not going to be part of the equation. Then Moriarty makes it so, and there are a only few choices left. Some are less unacceptable than others.

Everyone thinks Sherlock is crazy, except the people that matter. They think he’ll manage to come out laughing, because what he always has been, before this, is right.

Moriarty falls.  
Sherlock dies. 

 

If Sherlock had been the sort of child to pay any attention at all when Mummy had bullied he and Mycroft into church services through sheer maternal willpower, he could have told you he was going to Hell three minutes before the rector opened his mouth. Just because he wasn’t paying attention doesn’t make him wrong.

He does find himself mildly annoyed by the fact that he had apparently missed the part where Hell literally existed. It might have had something to do with all that astrology John had been on about months ago.

Sherlock makes a mental note to ask him about it, if he sees John again.

So, Hell. Rather like a depressing corridor of an NHS clinic in one of the seedier districts of London. Sherlock finds himself at the end of a queue, a grubby scrap of paper with the number 234,567 printed upon it in his hand. He wonders if the order of the number has any meaningful significance, but a tired-looking woman who had been cheating on her husband with the husband’s (substantially) younger brother joins the end of the queue, and her ticket reads 234,568, so he thinks probably not. Someone is slaughtering a Johann Strauss waltz on an eternal loop overhead.

Add in a pile of forms in triplicate and a minor bureaucratic function, and this would be Mycroft’s idea of Paradise. Sherlock shutters involuntarily at the thought. This is all utterly distasteful, and he has no intention of playing by the rules. Stepping out of the queue and walking forward brings the completely expected complication of two large men in suits moving into his way from the side corridors without so much as a scrape of a door opening. It’s a neat trick, but not what he’s interested in right now.

“Back in line,” says Suit One, and of course Hell would be run by Americans. (But the data is all muddled-- nicotine stains at the fingers, but teeth as white as can be, no bleaching translucency or caps. The improbable conclusion is: this is not a real person.) Sherlock backs away, babbling, “Right, so sorry, I was just looking for the loo.” He trips, stumbles into another person waiting, and there is an interlude of confusion while everyone sorts out hands and legs and acceptable personal space issues.

Suit Two watches all of this impassively, and slams a thuggish hand on Sherlock’s shoulder (sword calluses, archaic, interesting) once he’s separated himself. “The line,” Suit One repeats with more predictably dull menace, and Sherlock stiffles a sigh.

“Yes, of course,” he tells the Suits, acting what seems to be an appropriate level of cowed. “It’s only just-- I seem to have lost my bearings?” He holds up his ticket, which now reads 230,932.

He is returned to his (new) position in the queue. The Suits hover and glower for a while, and then go away as quietly as they appeared. Sherlock waits for what seems to be a reasonable interval (nine loops of the Blue Danube) and does it all again.

As he works his way up (down?) the queue, it’s not always Suit One and Two: sometimes it’s just one figure, sometimes it’s three or more. A few are dressed casually, most seem to prefer some variant of the type of horrible cheap suiting of which American public servants are so inordinately fond. They are inevitably predictable and wrong, as if they are adorning themselves with the trappings of humanity without remembering any of the subtleties.

He reaches the front, only to have another non-person clerk nod at him and hand him a slip of onion yellow paper in faded carbon copy (hah! Mycroft would be in fits of ecstasy.) This directs him to the back of the queue. They don’t even bother with a reason.

Sherlock’s discovered there’s such a place as the afterlife, and it is _appallingly_ poorly managed-- it’s tremendously disappointing, really. He’s had a harder time lifting badges off Lestrade’s pack of misfits than he’s having scamming the hordes of Hell, and for less satisfaction.

He crumples the paper and tosses it over one shoulder, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat and striding back the way he came. He thinks he’ll try a side corridor next; he wonders if they’ve thought to put anything behind the doors.

 

There are days (epochs, eras, dynasties-- the spheres below don’t have a solar cycle, so pick your chronological poison) when Crowley wonders what in life, death, or damnation had possessed him to covet the rulership of Hell. For instance, take today: he’s only just returned from facing down Belial and Astaroth over a frankly idiotic matter of office politics-- technicalities be damned, someone high Upstairs is going to notice if all of Canada breaks out simultaneously into a ritualistic orgy-- to find a lower demon cowering in front of his desk trying to explain how one petty mortal soul has broken Crowley’s waiting room and _it’s not the demon’s fault._

It’s Hell, so it’s not so shocking that good help is hard to find; it’s more that Crowley had never scraped the bottom of the subterranean levels of incompetence before this. It’s bloody exhausting is what it is, and it never lets up. He’s not going to have any help left if he feeds them all to Beelzebub, though, so Crowley just sighs, rubs at the bridge of his nose briefly to see if that chases off his impending headache (it doesn’t) and says, “Well then, have you tried transferring him to the Pit?”

“Ye-es,” says the demon slowly, cringing even lower. “But that doesn’t seem to be working. He...finds it interesting.”

“You mean he’s jumped off the rack already?” Crowley asks, irritated, because it’s not as if that’s a record and he doesn’t see why this is a problem coming between him and quality time with his Scotch.

“No, I mean he keeps giving the torturers direction and asking questions, but he won’t come down. He doesn’t even beg us to stop! We tried pulling out of his memories, but all he keeps saying is we’ve got her measurements wrong, or the way he flexes his hand, or some other mad thing. It’s impossible!” If demons had whites to their eyes, Crowley would be seeing them now, but he still gets the general idea. Incompetence. Subterranean depths of it.

“Fine,” he hisses. “Let me see what I can do.”

He finds the offending soul about midway down the Pit, which doesn't mean much of anything. What is remarkable is that it is eerily quiet; Crowley can hear the screams of other tortured souls in the distance, but apparently the handlers have beaten this one around the chest a bit, slashed half-heartedly at his arms and feet and face, and fled. There is the slow drip of blood, the occasional wet cough from the man bound to the rack, and nothing else. It’s almost peaceful.

Crowley is rescinding his earlier thoughts about restraining himself from feeding his incompetent minions to Beelzebub. There is going to be demons’ blood. Gallons of it. But first-- “We’re not usually this casual about this sort of thing,” Crowley says conversationally, stepping into the abattoir and lifting a cleaver from the bench to judge its heft and suitability. “My apologies. It’s such a shame to see how little the younger generation respects the proper way of doing a gent up.”

The man on the rack has his head tipped back, his eyes closed, but at this he looks up and focuses on Crowley for a moment. “Ah, Management, I take it?” he asks, and it ends on a cough.

Crowley would very much like to ask how he pegged that so quickly, because it’s not like he goes around wearing a nametag, thank you very much. But he has a balance of power to maintain here, so instead he comes over and runs the cleaver’s edge lightly down the man’s arm, across his bound palm. “You look like the type who values his hands,” he says thoughtfully, because they really are very nice-- long, elegant with a musician’s muscles. “I’ve always wondered: what’s the _minimum_ number of fingers you’d need to play an instrument? Two? One?”

He’s expecting _something,_ but the man doesn't even twitch. “They tore out all my fingernails and then followed up with the fingers a few hours ago,” he tells Crowley in a tone that is strangely academic for someone with that much blood pouring out of him. “Feel free. I’d like to compare the sensations.” He coughs again, and then with the first signs of any real emotion Crowley’s seen asks irritably, “Why does that keep happening?”

“The coughing?” Crowley runs a professional eye over the man’s torso. “Offhand, I’d say you have internal bleeding and it’s an involuntary reaction to your lungs filling up. Hard to say which will happen first: brain death from lack of blood or your choking on it.”

“Interesting,” the man says calmly, and tips his head back again, seemingly dismissing Crowley from his attentions.

Curiosity has always been Crowley’s abiding sin (when it isn’t vanity), so he gives in and puts down the cleaver. “My minions tell me you won’t come down off the rack. The pain or lack of it seems irrelevant to you, yet you find your impending exsanguination _interesting._ Do tell.”

“It’s a professional concern,” the man explains, somehow managing to sound imperious whilst strapped to a rusting metal frame and dying by inches. “I’ve read everything there is on these injuries, but one rarely gets to experience even one grievous bodily harm and come back to report on it. Here, I can compare them. It’s an excellent learning opportunity; I wouldn't expect you to understand.”

“You do understand you’re dead?” Crowley asks after a pause, because sometimes souls don’t, they’re already insane when they arrive. It’s a tedious process to break these to the truth but not unprecedented.

“Obviously,” snaps the man in a tone that implies Crowley is a mouth-breathing idiot. “Once I’m done here, I suppose I can take your amnesty offer and find out if this dull little realm has anything within it worth the effort of discovery. I have to say I haven’t been impressed so far. Your queue scheme was singularly mundane.”

Crowley bristles at that. First of all, the waiting room of the damned is a work of modern evil _genius,_ and never mind that he came up with it or that the traditionalists are constantly on his back about it. Second, Hell isn't in the business of extending educational junkets or sightseeing tours for lost souls. They’re into the screaming agony and the utter loss of hope. If this presumptuous little mortal git wants to make light of it, Crowley’s more than half convinced he should drag him down to the Cage and leave him down there with Lucifer and Michael tearing at him for a century or two to see what he makes of the very nadir of despair.

Still, Crowley hasn't kept his skin in one piece or climbed as high (well, low) as he has without being able to rationally evaluate his position. He realizes (with something like an arctic chill through the bones he no longer wears) that he very nearly had been about to take this infuriating mortal, this same man who had shattered Crowley’s mobius-strip holding tank in under a day, and stick him in the one place in existence that must never, ever be opened again. Then he was going to dare him to try it.

Right. Crowley isn't a mouth-breathing idiot. He’s actually pretty clever, most of the time, and he treasures these little illusions about himself.

“I’m beginning to see what has my torturers in such a tizzy about you,” he comments, taking a step back and sighing out through his nose. “I think we've gotten off on the wrong foot, as the saying goes. I’m Crowley, King of the Crossroads, recently self-appointed ruler of the realms below, and I suspect I can make a better counter-offer to your proposal. Now, you might be?”

The man says, “Sherlock,” followed by, “Hglaghhh,” and Crowley supposes that’s the final word on the bleeding vs. choking debate. He hates the Pit. It only takes a finger snap to restore his jacket to order and the man to a fully-clothed, uninjured state, but he knows the blood was there and now not thinking about it is going to be like white elephants.

Sherlock seems mildly surprised to be standing upright and not spitting vital body fluids, but the first words out of his mouth are “What is your counter-offer?” This, Crowley can work with.

“How much do you know about Heaven?” he asks Sherlock with a warm grin. “Because it’s mystery the whole way down, and I’m sure they’d love to meet _you._ ”

 

Crowley closes the deal for Purgatory later that week. Pulling the wool over Castiel’s eyes is laughably easy, and he only has to part with 49,999 souls and one very special pain-in-his-arse to do so. It’s a Hell of a bargain, if he does say so himself.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I was a much better as a reader than a participant in this whole business, and then Supernatural ate my brain. This is the first fic I've written in years, and yet it's a _crossover_. ...Whoops?
> 
> Because of the whole "years" situation, I don't have a check for my inappropriate Americanisms or a beta reader...but if you have suggestions for either, it would be much appreciated. And thanks for reading!


End file.
